::A Geek in Korea::

A little more than one year ago I wrote about Songbird. Songbird is what you get if you took iTunes, broke down the wall that kept you in the iTunes store, then set it loose on the web. Instead of being forced to go through what is available from labels, you can surf the entire INTERNET looking for songs.

Visit one of the Mp3 blogs that are easy to find with Songbird, and all of a sudden you can be exposed to hundreds of different sources of music. Listen to the songs as you surf, then download what you like. It will keep track of all the music you find, organize them, and even sync them to a mp3 player. Better yet, it’s built on Mozilla, so you can have “Firefox” like features like tab browsing and advertising blocking.

The 0.1 version I was using last year was a little rough around the feathers. It showed promise, but it needed to smooth some of the processes that to get to the useful features. Right now, the 0.3 version is a vast improvement. The entire GUI is much more responsible and stable. The plugins I tried out weren’t really ready for use with Linux. They also seemed to be version dependent. I hope they eventually adopt a Firefox 2.0 plugin system that makes most things platform agnostic as well as automatic to update.

Does it beat the current reigning champ of music organization in Linux land: Amarok? Not yet. Amarok is more polished, and it has tons of plugins that are very slick. I also like the playlists and the great management features. It’s bar none the best music player simply because it’s had the time to be polished like a diamond.

However, I’m running Songbird these days just as much because I still get that giddy feeling when I find a new song. If you are looking for some web remixes or want to find a few random tracks from an artist you’ve stumbled upon for the first time, I’d recommend giving it a try. It’s clearly got some momentum, and it’s getting better. Who knows where it will be in a year?

It runs on EVERYTHING, Windows, Linux, and Mac, so you have know excuse, you know?